Strategies

In a world where we don’t know what tomorrow will look like, safety comes from being able to continuously experiment. The winners get to failure faster, more frequently, using fewer resources, and learning from it quicker than others. So if you operate in a fast-changing changing world, then it is time to retrain your instincts. It’s too risky not to.

Piloting in business innovation means testing an idea effectively. This is not a straightforward process and requires addressing the right questions: What idea should we test? Which aspect of it? How should we go about testing? How should we measure the results? What do we allow these results to mean and what do we do afterwards?

In the current business environment, defined by some as the ‘Knowledge Age’, leadership interest is increasingly focused on Innovation and Knowledge Management development efforts. To date, these functions often operate along parallel, yet discrete, paths. As organizations seek new areas of growth, while further cutting costs there is an increasing need to build more effective partnerships in order to ensure ongoing success and drive additional business value.

The traditional consulting business model is based on two principle ideas: (1) hiring people (top talent if possible) and (2) charging clients a fee per hour or day for gaining access to this talent, its expertise and/or manpower. Depending on the type of consulting or the brand, the pendulum swings more towards focusing on providing, and buying on the customer side, the more sophisticated expertise or the simpler manpower.

The rise of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdtransporting, crowdletting, etc., has transformed our economy. It has also ushered in the era of the shared economy. Previously marginalized people can now contribute, no matter how small, to all walks of life. It seems to be a fantastic opportunity for the world to access the untapped skill of the crowd. But what about the people whose jobs this makes redundant? Whither the expert?

We have identified the six major paradigm shifts that are disrupting how we see the world and do business. Recognizing these shifts will help innovation leadership discover opportunities in a wide variety of fields and develop game-changing business models.

Frugal engineering means developing simple products for emerging markets and is becoming increasingly important for many companies. Frugal products are not cheap or inferior, they are simplified and yet qualitatively robust. But how can frugal products be developed successfully?

How does the disruptive machine work? In this article Alex Chenevier offers a consolidated view of his previous publication, (before introducing his disruptive innovation methodology) by recording his research itinerary and extracting three intertwined progresses (the knowledge space, the path dependency and knowledge fusion), ultimately surfacing a unified model. The scientific equation of K³ey Performance Indicator℠ is perhaps the first definite, quantifiable and measurable model, and therefore applicable in business terms.

While innovation is crucial for driving customer engagement and increasing share of wallet, companies continue to struggle with the “what” and “how” of it. For each best-practice organization that has streamlined its innovation processes, there are many that are still paralyzed by their haphazard approach toward identifying and evaluating ideas. Evalueserve interacted with many of its Fortune 100 clients and identified six strategies that enhance the likelihood of developing successful innovation programs.

Leading CEOs worldwide expect major changes to their company’s business model until 2020. As a consequence, organizations are currently about to realize that, today, business model innovation has become as important as technological innovation. However, developing new and viable business models still represents a serious challenge for large incumbent firms despite their resources, know-how, and key technologies. This article provides 10 guidelines for mastering business model innovation challenges in established companies.

Most companies recognize the need for breakthrough innovation – it can change the fundamental bases of competition, “rewrite the rules” of an industry and transform the prospects of the successful innovator. There is no one-size-fits-all model for how best to respond to this challenge. Arthur D. Little surveyed over 80 large organizations to explore how to deliver a consistent pipeline of radically new products, performance features, business models and market space.

In my first article in this series, I talked about the continued, and often misplaced, focus of corporate innovation leaders on developing disruptive innovation efforts. My basic argument within the article was the while “Big I” innovation can be a valid driver of growth. However, few companies are in the right position or have laid the appropriate groundwork to support and develop new, groundbreaking ideas, especially in the context of the existing organizational culture.

Your greatest innovation opportunity may be right in front of you. The problem is you don’t see it. Every day for the last decade of your life this problem has annoyed and frustrated you. Its solution is worth billions of dollars and would open up a totally new market. The problem is, like the millions of other people who have this problem, you don’t think of it as a problem anymore. You’ve been desensitized. You’ve lost your ability to innovate because of something called habituation.

The accepted approach for Corporate Innovation leaders is to secure buy-in from all stakeholders, in order to secure success. This article (first in a series) argues against this approach, aiming for a more tempered effort, that seeks enough buy-in to push forward.

Time and time again I get asked and challenged on an age-old issue of whether or not mind mapping is, at worst, just another fad, a ”nice to have” or, at best, a real value-adding benefit that has a serious place within a business or organisation.